Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
to “mouse look” in Second Life. Usually found in “irst person shooter” games and may allow the
players to see their hands and weapons for aiming purposes.
Frustum:
the pyramidal shaped volume that a projector creates from the start of its beam until it hits a plane
or intersecting surface.
Gouraud shading:
developed by Henri Gouraud, this kind of smooth shading uses the vertex normals (nor-
mal average of all surrounding planes) and the interpolation of many vertex intensities across the
surface of a 3D polygonal model to produce the effect of a smooth surface. This kind of shading
produces a smooth light-to-dark transition in the shadows of the geometrical surface.
Grieing:
actions or activities by avatars with the intent of making the experience of a virtual place unpleas-
ant or threatening. Often involving push scripts, overloading the location with prims, or broadcast-
ing a loud noise via the voice chat channel.
Grid:
a collection of regions laid out in a rectilinear grid system, interconnected via a simulator grid service
for transport of avatars, messages and content across the virtual landscape. Represented in a map
form for the players to orient themselves to the environment, a grid can include thousands of regions.
These regions can be grouped to form “Continents” or a “Main Land.”
Harmony of Dominant Tint:
a method of unifying elements in a design or artistic composition by coloring
all of them with the same tint, which visually harmonizes the composition.
HMD: (Head Mounted Display):
devices such as the Oculus Rift that project a stereoscopic image on a
display screen, or the Virtual Retinal Display that projects a virtual world image directly into the
eyes. These devices bring the visitor into a state of deeper immersion in a virtual world.
HUD (Heads Up Display):
a graphic element within the player's visual ield that allows the player to access
menus, activate programs or scripts, or gives information for the purposes of enhancing the virtual
environmental experience.
Ideagora:
a hybrid term that combines the words “idea” and “agora” (ancient Greek public space), and is used
to represent places on the Internet where people can meet in a virtual space to exchange ideas, and
build things together. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams irst used this word in “Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” (ISBN 1591841380), December 2006.
IAR (Inventory ARchive):
a ile saving process which collects all the content assets of an avatar's inventory
into one single ile, allowing that data to be moved and loaded into another OpenSim installation or
transferred to another avatar's inventory.
IEZA framework:
a concept framework, created by Sander Huibers and Richard van Tol at the Utrecht
School of the Arts, for the purpose of organizing and deining the audio used in virtual environments.
Immersion:
the shift in a player's perception as their attention focuses on the virtual world and its activities.
This effect, enhanced with the use of headsets and/or viewers such as the Oculus Rift, utilizes sound
effects, music, and visual images to envelop the player in the experience of the game.
Inworld:
pertaining to the virtual location of an object, sound, animation or avatar entity that is experienced
and/or manipulated through the client viewer while the user is logged into a virtual world.
Instantiation:
the process of creating an object within a virtual space by accessing a prebuilt element, or
bringing in pre-built content. All content is an “instance” that represents the underlying data. This
process is also known as “rezzing,” or to “rez” an object. An object is rezzed by dragging it from the
avatar's inventory list to the virtual ground, or building platform.
JIRA:
bug tracking software for projects and programs created by Atlassian. The name is a truncated version
of Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla.
LSL (Linden Scripting Language):
a language based on the Java and C programming languages and used
throughout Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds to direct an object in that world to do a series
of tasks. LSL scripts are located in the contents of objects in the virtual world environment. An
